Down came the news, like a hammer blow — hold on a bit, that won’t do. I’m writing about James J. Kilpatrick: No clichés allowed. The world’s out-writingest writer, so far as this disciple is concerned, never did take kindly to stale modes of expression or to gobbledegook, euphemisms, redundancies, wanton word coinages, and the like. I’ll try a more suitable approach to the topic. Recent word of James J. Kilpatrick’s retirement from his syndicated column leaves one fan in Texas with oddly assorted emotions — sadness on the one hand, for the end of an oeuvre and an era; on the other hand, deep gratitude for the unmitigated joy that Kilpo’s nimble brain and typing fingers have given this groupie for almost half a century. He’s the best — the greatest. Not merely No. 1 Pea in his own beloved and self-devised Black-Eyed Pea Society, but master of the art of persuasion through cadence, word choice, poetic invention, and not-so-plain eloquence. They talk of Mencken, and, yes, he was pretty good, if also pretty vain. There was, more recently, Kilpo’s esteemed friend Bill Buckley, a writer renowned for wit, fluency, and the recondite word choice. There was Westbrook Pegler, whom Kilpatrick himself esteemed, and, additionally, the Wall Street Journal’s incisive Vermont Connecticut Royster. All were top-notch writers. At the top of his game, nevertheless, Kilpatrick could and did beat the lot of them. The muses surely touched him, in a way they did not touch others of us in his profession. He started syndicating in 1964. I had a journalistic mash on him even then, from his political commentary in National Review. Eventually he picked up 400 newspapers and gained still greater fame from his “No, no, Shana,” moments on 60 Minutes, from which even the very liberal Shana Alexander probably learned some tricks. Kilpo’s conservative sensibilities — his care for the venerable, the fragile, the historic; his care for carefulness itself — inform the best of his writings. I still have a yellowed column from 1969 in which he deplored “the bulldozer syndrome” afflicting American cities: “a shameful indictment of a rootless people,” he called it. He inveighed against the “liturgical butchers” bent on disemboweling the Episcopal Church’s Book of Common Prayer. Even liberals could appreciate the sheer beauty with which Kilpatrick clothed his prose and the spirit with which he held aloft, deliberately, the ideals of written English. He has the writer’s ear. He hears this stuff, as if Bach were playing it on the organ. It sings to him and through him to us. In 1984, Kilpo published The Writer’s Art, a compendium of admonitions and analyses of what goes into a good English sentence. I served up large chunks of it in the college classroom, where for five years I taught “persuasive writing.” The book is full of excellent advice, one particular fragment of which I insistently shoved down my students’ throats: To learn to write, “read everything. Read matchbox covers, read labels on cans of cleaner; read the graffiti on lavatory walls. Read for information, read for style, read for instruction, read for the sheer love of reading.” Find out what’s good, find out what’s bad. Find out what works for you, find out what doesn’t. Among the authors my students read was James Jackson Kilpatrick, chiefly out of a little book he wrote about life in the Rappahannock Valley of Virginia, where he and his wife had put down mid-life roots. Perhaps it was there that Kilpo learned to deduce the large lessons of life from the seasons and their appurtenances. Or maybe he knew all along. Anyway, under a Scrabble, Va., dateline he wrote some of the wisest and most gorgeous stuff you’ll easily find. I taught imagery to my students by having them read, among other things, “April bursts upon our hills in one prodigious leap — and all the stage is filled at once, whole choruses of tulips, arabesques of forsythia, cadenzas of flowering plum.” Later the image shifts: “The maples do not come forth in green: they are flowering red, soft as slippers, in tassels like a jester’s scepter. The flowering almond is pink, absurdly pink, little-girl pink, as pink as peppermint and cream.” Adjacent mountains didn’t just squat there. Instead, “Our dark mountains, great-hipped, big-breasted, slumber on the western sky, their massive bulk as still as bronze by Henry Moore.” How much of this great stuff my students took in, I couldn’t say. Still, it wasn’t their sole exposure to Kilpo. I regularly distributed in class the weekly syndicated column he wrote on language, having signed off on political persuasion. (He took up also a column on another of his lifetime loves, the courts and the law.) Again and again he enjoined writers to make sure they place the adverb “only” where it rightly belongs in a sentence, and not where they just think it belongs. He denied that “since” is the same as “because.” He sternly forbade “quality” as an adjective, as in “quality time.” “Arguably” he declared a fad word, a no-no for the good writer. “Opines,” to Kilpo, was a “sissy verb.” He called for the sparing use of foreign words and phrases. He spoke up for the split infinitive (one of the few points on which I differ with the master). He campaigned against verbosity. No more, no more! How sad! Or maybe we’ll see. The master’s syndicate explains that, at 88, Kilpo isn’t moving as fast as he once did. (Who is, might I ask?) What the muses give you to do, you go on, I imagine, feeling the itch to do, and you know how it is with itches — they demand scratching. To my main man, Kilpo, I can say only (I think I placed that correctly): Take all the time you want, save up, ruminate, meditate. Got something to say? We will be waiting for it. We can’t help ourselves. All hail.

– William Murchison is a syndicated columnist. His book Mortal Follies: Episcopalians and the Crisis of Mainline Christianity (Encounter) is due out in March.